Someone needs to sit down and talk to folks about social networking, and things that people should just not do. The New York Times leads off with a note that an Israeli Defense Force raid was called off because of an entry on Facebook. There is going to be pain involved with the debrief.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained that the soldier posted a status update letting friends know that his unit was preparing to go to a West Bank village near Ramallah: “On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home,” the soldier wrote. Haaretz added that the soldier, who has been relieved of combat duty, “also disclosed the name of the combat unit, the place of the operation and the time it will take place.” After noticing his indiscretion, Haaretz reports, “Facebook friends then reported him to military authorities.”
Source: NY Times

There are some seriously wrong issues with people posting information on Facebook and not realizing that many others are going to get to see it. This is more of a social issue, and one that we seem to be missing when we discuss social networking overall. While there have been many people fired for their various social networking posts, this is the first I have heard that an actual military exercise was called off because someone posted something to Facebook that they should not have posted. We really should start looking at what we are doing with social networking and how we approach sharing of information. While the IDF soldier was probably not thinking and just wanted to update his status, the reality is that he also tipped off a lot of people that a raid was coming up. We have seen that social networking is of deep interest to governments. The Iran Green Revolution was tweeted, with the US State Department asking that the site not go down during the duration of the unrest that was happening in Iran. There have even been arrests of activists because of twitter. What makes this unique though is that an entire military exercise was called off. It is well past time that we sit down with folks and talk about information that is good for public consumption and information that should be protected. No one intentionally wants to end up on Failbooking which is a wonderfully funny site that is all about the things someone should never say on Facebook, I am sure the IDF members Facebook status update is going to show up there soon. In the longer run though, we do need to start having this discussion at work, and in our families about things that people could reasonably want to know, against those things that are career killing episodes that people really should not post online. tags: idf, military exercise, canceled, disclosure, facebook, wtf